Animalia

Sérgio Currais, Oct 2015

Nuno Horta returns, in Animalia, to his masked characters that gather both the beautiful and the disturbing, in a set of photos that become inevitable magnets to the eye, and that make indifference just impossible. Again with some kind of terrifying suggestion, in black and golden, with straight poses, in a fantasized urban jungle, the presence of these misterious beings, glamorous agents of fear, becomes at the same time aggressive and seductive. Some kind of inverted centaurs, with anthropomorphic bodies and animalistic heads, they remind us of the ambiance of the mansion in Kubrick’s last movie, the mighty and unforgettable Eyes wide shut. This alternative mythological fauna summits this imagery of the horror tales, in which animals transmute to human forms, claiming a certain dominion of nature, a war that has been waged since the beginnings of creation.